September 30, 2006

We are often asked about CRM’s for the salesforce, especially for the startup companies that we work with. Salesforce.com immediately comes to mind for them, but can work out quite expensive. There are others of course, SugarCRM, SiebelCRM etc, but the one that we really think that gives value for money is ZohoCRM. You may not have heard of it, but this CRM has most of the features you will ever need, and is currently free for up to 3 users with value for money pricing after that (starting at $12 per user).

There are actually two versions, an on-demand SAAS solution and On-premise edition (supports Linux and Windows) for dedicated in-house deployment.

September 29, 2006

SPAM mail is a problem for all of us and its getting worse. I don’t know about you, but we become reticent about having to fill out an online form or giving out our email address in case it is harvested for spam. Enter “Disposable Email”.

Mailinator seems to be one of the easiest to use. Whenever you need a disposable email address, just make up any word, then follow it with “@mailinator.com”. You don’t need to register in advance. Go to mailinator.com and enter that word. You can then retrieve any email that has been sent to that address. It will expire automatically sometime in the future – very useful….

September 23, 2006

A very useful link if you need to get in touch with anyone at IBM – you need to know at least the surname of the person you need to contact, and preferably the full name. This is a great resource if you do business with IBM

September 15, 2006

The “first European search engine” is taking on Google with its propreitary AI technology. Accoona.eu has been designed to automatically understand what language is being used for a query. Accoona also outlines how the technology understands the meaning of a search query rather than just looking at individual keywords or boolean strings.

Google sneaked out a nice little tool recently called Related Links. Web designers can place Related Links units on their site to provide visitors with links to useful information that’s relevenat to their site’s content, including news, searches and pages.

Web 2.0 is often spoken of as a future goal, but the truth is that the change from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 is in many ways indefinable. The change is a gradual growth and we are currently witnessing the segway from one to the other, with new business models and companies showing what can be done, with the most fruitful area being Software as a Service (SAAS).

This being said, it is possible to highlight 10 key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0:

1. Open standards Base: Ensure service connectivity is reliable

2. Ubiquitious Broadband: The infrastructure is now available to support web 2.0 models.

3. Less investment required: Companies can get far without a massive investment meaning companies can quickly be incubated to spread the risk.

September 14, 2006

Interesting Data from recent research breaks out a Sales Reps biggest mistakes from the viewpoint of a customer. One hundred and thirty eight customers were interviewed and the results were as follows:

Don’t follow up – 17%

Don’t listen to needs – 18%

Don’t follow companies buying process – 26%

Are pushy and aggressive – 12%

Don’t explain their solutions – 10%

Make inaccurate claims – 10%

Don’t understand the business or vertical – 4%

Act too familiar – 3%

Don’t know or respect competition – 2%

Other – 2%

In our experience not enough salesman treat sales as a vocation. It’s not good enough to just be able to “sell”. For example iff you are selling products into the Financial Services Sector then you need people who know the “space” – put another way, people who can “talk the talk and walk the walk” – who know their way around and understand the challenges faced.

Like any vocation, applied training, and adhering to a successful repeatable process has its own rewards.